The Human Fabric of the Web

Sketching out the the social structure of a large company such as Facebook is a task which is important not only in order to understand the impact of such a global internet phenomenon as the social network on the society, local and global economy, and civil freedoms, but also to better understand how the development of high-end technology and communication infrastructures intertwine with the accumulation of capital and political power. Even though the world is at the point of postglobal development (a point where global is already reached and the new local is what the market needs), the deep embeddedness of the company in the economic, political and social elite/establishment of one society/country is what makes the company strong enough to act globally – and not, as is often thought, through the cooperation of the elites around the world... As our investigation shows, the real fabric of the web consists of the personalsocial networks of specific people in the higher strata of the company. If anything other than its profit, this is what keeps the whole structure together and safe from any change in the political establishment.

The experiment, say the scholars, indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions. “For some kinds of thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” cautions Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a member of the research team. “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states.” It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that as the net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts.

There are those who are heartened by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the web’s intellectual ethic. “Technological progress does not reverse,” writes a Wall Street Journal columnist, “so the trend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue.” We need not worry, though, because our “human software” will in time “catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible.” We’ll “evolve” to become more agile consumers of data. The writer of a cover story in New York magazine says that as we become used to “the 21st-century task” of “fitting” among bits of online information, “the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.” We may lose our capacity “to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end,” but in recompense we’ll gain new skills, such as the ability to “conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media.” A prominent economist writes, cheerily, that “the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores.” An Atlantic author suggests that our “technology-induced ADD” may be “a short-term problem,” stemming from our reliance on “cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow.” Developing new cognitive habits is “the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.”

These writers are certainly correct in arguing that we’re being molded by our new information environment. Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keynote of intellectual history. But if there’s comfort in their reassurances, it’s of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively it’s a neutral process. What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere.”

It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.

Members of social network platforms often choose to reveal private information, and thus sacrifice some of their privacy, in exchange for the manifold opportunities and amenities offered by such platforms. In this article, we show that the seemingly innocuous combination of knowledge of confirmed contacts between members on the one hand and their email contacts to non-members on the other hand provides enough information to deduce a substantial proportion of relationships between non-members. Using machine learning we achieve an area under the (receiver operating characteristic) curve () of at least for predicting whether two non-members known by the same member are connected or not, even for conservative estimates of the overall proportion of members, and the proportion of members disclosing their contacts.

In other words “Based on realistic assumptions about the percentage of a population that are members of a social network and the probability with which they will upload their e-mail address books, the calculations enabled us to accurately predict 40 percent of the relationships between non-members,” concluded study co-author Dr. Michael Hanselmann of Heidelberg University.

Social Envy - Study Finds Facebook Causes Depression And Isolation

BERLIN - Social networks like Facebook make many things easier. You can find out right away if Alex got the job or not, and you can not only read about Marie’s vacation, but you can also see all those pictures of her on the beach, too.

There’s also a downside to this. Researchers have conducted tests that show that people who spend a lot of time scrolling on Facebook are more socially isolated and more frequently depressed than those who do not.

The question, of course, poses itself: are lonely people more drawn to social networks – or does constant surfing result in loneliness over time?

While it wasn’t able to answer the question conclusively, a joint research study conducted by Berlin’s Humboldt University and the Darmstadt’s Technical University did however reveal that spending time on social networks could lead to negative feelings.

The German researchers, led by Dr. Hanna Krasnova, conducted two studies with 600 Facebook users. The results, which will be presented at the end of February at the "11th International Conference Wirtschaftsinformatik (Information Systems)" at the University of Leipzig, show that Facebook can stir up intense envy and can also negatively impact life satisfaction, particularly for passive users.

People who communicate relatively infrequently but read the posts of friends and click through their pictures tend to be less satisfied with their own life, according to the researchers. They asked their subjects to cite possible reasons for this – why using Facebook could awaken a sense of frustration.

The never-ending “envy spiral”

"Envy" was the answer in nearly 30% of cases, followed by 20% of those who deplored “lack of feedback” to their posts by other users. In 36% of cases, subjects said they “sometimes to very often” felt frustrated by Facebook.

Most envied were the vacations or leisure activities of others, followed by social interactions such as, for example, seeing that a friend got more virtual happy birthday wishes than one had received for one’s own birthday. This is different than face-to-face relations, where envy is fueled by the success, talent and possessions of others.

On social networks on the other hand, everybody tries to come across at their very best, often embellishing their profiles. According to researchers, Facebook “friends” become a reference group against which one starts to compare one’s own popularity and success – and this easily leads to glorifying others and putting them above oneself, i.e. the perfect recipe for feelings of envy. Researchers coined the phrase “envy spiral” to describe this phenomenon.

"Envy can proliferate on social networks and become even more intense in the case of passive users," the researchers write. "Considering the fact that Facebook use is a worldwide phenomenon and envy is a universal feeling, a lot of people are subject to these painful consequences," said the study.